A desirable photographic effect is “bokeh”, the strong blurring of objects that are not the main subject of the picture. This is an aesthetic quality of blur that is not easily achieved with digital cameras that use low-cost lenses. The general solution in the low-cost digital camera arena is to capture two or more images with different focus setting of the lens and to digitally merge, or “fuse”, the images to produce a bokeh effect. There are many descriptions of systems that capture multiple images with different focus settings (a “through-focus” series) and then merging them to produce desired images. In U.S. Patent Application Publication 2007/0035712 Gassner, et al., teach capturing a through-focus series of images, computing image contrast for each image, and then composing a composite image from the regions of the through-focus images with highest contrast. In U.S. Patent Application Publication 2009/0121027 Nadabar describes another way of combining the best portions of each image in a through-focus series into a desired composite image. Finally, Mrityunjay Kumar, in “Optimal image fusion using the Rayleigh quotient,” IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium, February 2009, describes fusing images from a through-focus series in such a way as to maximize the energy of the resulting image. The difficulty with all these approaches is that the segmentation of the subject of interest from the rest of the objects in the scene based on image contrast and other energy-based arguments will only find the objects that are the most in-focus in the through-focus series. The important additional cue of subject distance is not directly used. Additionally, with the previous methods only one composite image is generated from the through-focus series where, in fact, it is possible to generate several different images, each with different main subjects with their own bokeh effects from the same through-focus series. In this last regard, what is missing is a way to automatically produce one or more refocused images with a given main subject in-focus and the rest of the scene aesthetically out-of-focus from a through-focus series of captures.